


Setup and Payoff

by spunknbite



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Bullshit Derry mindfuckery strikes again, M/M, Temporary Amnesia, a wreck it fic?, brief mention of Richie/OMC, brief reference to drug use, guys i made the canon worse, that’s what this is, what’s the opposite of a fix it fic?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:07:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23046742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spunknbite/pseuds/spunknbite
Summary: Let me tell you a story.Richie said it because it was all he knew how to do anymore, and because there’s closure in a carefully crafted story, which doesn’t reflect life.Jokes are stories.They’re condensed, tidy. Beginning, middle, and end are replaced with setup and payoff. Introduce a concept and see it through to a rewarding conclusion.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 48
Kudos: 141





	Setup and Payoff

_Let me tell you a story_.

He said it on stage, at the bar with friends, to his manager, to the brown-eyed, brunette guy with the semi-knowing smile who hung around after the show. This guy — too tall, too broad, leaning up against the brick wall of the club by the stage door, cigarette in hand, fingernails dusted with nicotine — he wasn’t _right_ , but he was there, and showing up fucking counted for something. _How did you know? How did you know this one piece of me, at least?_ Richie would have asked, but the air was cold and the smoke off this guy’s breath was warm, and who was to say who initiated what, when what really mattered was that it was initiated at all, and that several drinks in they were in the back of an Uber going to Richie’s hotel, or God knows where. He wasn’t particular about the details.

 _Let me tell you a story_.

He said it because it was all he knew how to do anymore, and because there’s closure in a carefully crafted story, which doesn’t reflect life.

(Should we consider what a story is? What is its purpose? A story is a narrative; a fixed version of events arranged in a sequential order as to convey a meaning, a foundational truth that the listener — for stories are not stories without someone to hear them, even if it’s the same person doing the telling — can derive from their contents. Stories imply a beginning, middle, and end, and thus they entail linearity. There is a promise of comprehension, rationality, a takeaway that is readily understandable for anyone paying attention.)

Richie was always paying attention, even when he didn’t look it.

And he said _let me tell you a story_ with an easy smile, one that almost reached his eyes on good nights, and less than a handful of people in the world would recognize it as cracked and glassy, a facade on which to hang the words that followed. The people who would see through it weren’t here, though.

_Jokes are stories._

They’re condensed, tidy. Beginning, middle, and end are replaced with setup and payoff. Introduce a concept and see it through to a rewarding conclusion.

In the hotel now, lights purposefully off, stretched out above the brunette, and Richie tucked his forehead into the small of the guy’s back so he wouldn’t see that he was too pale even in the dark, wouldn’t notice the out-of-place tattoo on his arm as his hands clutched the bedsheets, and something inside of Richie — _something_ , like he didn’t know exactly where the thought came from — begged for the stats on unsanitized tattoo needles in relation to Hep B and C.

After, Richie told the guy some story, some joke as he was pulling on his pants. Because he was good at it. Because the quiet didn’t swallow, it gulped. And the story had all the hallmarks of a narrative, and that was good enough even if it was hollow.

*

This was not the sort of story Richie told, on stage or to cocksure brunettes. It was not an easily digestible tale with a strong conclusion or punchline; it hadn’t been written and rewritten, edited once then twice then several more times until it was concise and clean, narrative wrinkles smoothed out by an iron-hot red pen.

No, this story was one of gaps and holes, non sequiturs and unreliable narrators, and it began _in medias res_ , and not for any artistic reasons, but because he hadn’t remembered the beginning, the setup, until he was well past it.

Not until Mike called. And even then, the memories weren’t complete. Patchy, a first draft. The shape was there — a terror that seemed faceless, surreal; a group of friends, blurred; a boy Richie could almost see, and a soul-sick ache that accompanied him — but the memories were unfinished, a book with missing paragraphs scattered throughout the otherwise full pages of text. More had filled in at dinner at the Jade; that boy was a man now, taller, with anxiety written around his mouth and eyes, lining his forehead, but the soul-sickness remained the same, _claw-sharp_ in Richie’s chest. 

( _Foreshadowing_ , important in the telling of stories; a throwaway line or image that’s meaningless in the current context but cements the atmosphere and delivers a punch for those who see what it forebodes; for everyone else it creates a retrospective sense of inevitability, as though the ending was preordained. Real life has no such warning device, and even if it had, Richie would never have used the words _claw-sharp_ to describe anything, let alone the hammering of his heart and the half-wood he had from looking over at the guy accosting a waitress about cashews.)

That _claw-sharp_ sickness was a pain in Richie’s chest that he might have taken for a heart attack if he hadn’t then, sitting at the Jade, remembered he spent the better part of his adolescence feeling the same throes. A racing heart that battered his chest more than it beat in it, violent, to the rhythm of an old refrain, _don’t let him know._

_Eds._

The memories scratched his mind like pen to paper — how he used to write back in college when he was first starting out, cobbling together clumsy jokes out of scraps of thoughts on scraps of notebook paper — and they unfurled like cursive letters, slow and deliberate.

_Eddie, so small, barely school-aged, bending over him with a bandage as Richie’s knees bled._

_Eddie next to him in the backseat of his dad’s Buick, screaming Michael Jackson lyrics._

_Eddie pressing his face into Richie’s shoulder as Jeff Goldblum stepped into the transporter on the big screen above them._

_Eddie leaning out his bedroom window as Richie shimmied up the drainpipe._

_Eddie huddled against the upturned table in the kitchen on Neibolt Street, clutching his arm._

_(And all the while, right from the start, that soul-sickness. A consuming chorus of pleases and let mes and anythings that reddened his face and twisted his stomach and clenched his heart, and Richie had recognized the fucking futility of it before he even knew what the word gay meant.)_

So he told some jokes instead, from his spot at the Jade, eating already-cold dumplings. He singled Eddie out because _that’s what he did_ , his memories told him. Poke. Push and pull. Poke again. Wait for a response. A well-rehearsed script between them, something so practiced from years ago that they fell into the pattern without hesitation, and when Eddie laughed it lit him up and suddenly Richie realized why the hell he’d spent the better part of the last two decades trying to make other people laugh, because _this_ was the response he’d always wanted.

Still the setup was incomplete. He remembered the summer of ‘89, It, Neibolt, and pieces of the rest. Some felt significant, most not, but the gaps in the story, _his story_ , were pressing. Black holes of knowledge that he could almost see to the other side of, but the obscurity remained thick with whatever Derry bullshit caused it. 

Walking to the Barrens in the early hours, his strides fell in time with Eddie’s, and when Eds mentioned a snow fort in Stan’s backyard and fishing off of the Penobscot River, Richie couldn’t recall either.

“You don’t remember fishing with your dad?” he asked. “There was this old dock — looked kind of hazardous to me — near the eastern end of Brewster, I think. You went every summer. I came a few times.”

And with that description, the memory seemed to ink itself back into existence, and Richie saw the river. The rickety dock, its wood sun-bleached and knotty, chosen because of the deep drop-off into the Penobscot that helped with the trout and the bass, or so his dad had claimed while carrying the rusty tackle box and styrofoam cup of worms. Richie had trailed behind, mind back at the arcade.

There were other fishing trips too. Eddie looked at the worms with a shy curiosity, like he wanted to touch them but had thought better of it, and Richie’s dad showed him how to bait his hook anyway. Sunscreen and bug spray and a cooler of soda and morning-made sandwiches, and if Richie’s thighs pressed up against Eddie’s as they sat together at the end of the dock, lines cast, it seemed excusable somehow, permissible this far enough away from the everyday.

They’d drop Eddie back at his house in the evening, Mrs. K in the doorway to usher Eddie inside, and on the short trip from Eddie’s house to theirs, his dad had looked back at him in the rear-view mirror and said, “He’s a good kid,” with a sort of open pointedness, an understanding bordering on encouragement, and Richie knew then he’d been caught, so he pressed his face into the window of the car door, eyes closed.

(In a story someone would write down, intentionally crafted with purpose and attention, this moment would have been a setup to a later payoff, something to call back to with his dad. A heart-to-heart, a _thank you for being a good dad_ , a _you were there for me even if I wasn’t ready for it_ , but he hadn’t remembered the setup, and so the payoff went unsaid.)

Eddie didn’t remember being suspended for three days in tenth grade for throwing a punch at Christopher Michaud after he broke Richie’s glasses. He also didn’t remember Richie skipping classes those three days so they could hang out in Eddie’s bedroom with a stack of comics and some shitty horror flicks.

None of them remembered the clubhouse until they got there, save for Mike of course.

This isn’t how stories go, not the ones that get told, passed on. Because this isn’t how causality goes, either. What else was he missing? What other cavities were there; what information had been lost to some crevasse, some deep chamber, some _cistern_? 

*

Eddie said, “You came back,” after Richie stopped puking on the carpeted floor of the library.

“Remembered some stuff.”

Stan. The synagogue. _Maybe I don’t want to forget._

He stepped over Bowers’ body — _what the fuck do you do with a body?_ — and sat heavily on one of the study tables, weak-kneed, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket. Eddie followed, producing a bottle of water from his back pocket.

Eddie was patched up, an oversized bandage taped to his cheek, and that was inherently wrong, because it was always Eddie who did the patching up, not the one who needed it, or so his own patched together memories told him.

“What happened to your face?” 

Eddie gestured to Bowers, then handed Richie the water.

“No, I meant in general. I remember you being way better looking —”

A punch in the arm, like something from before. Faux levity in the face of...whatever the hell was going on. “It’s comforting to know that no matter how fucked up everything is, you haven’t changed, Rich.”

_I should have been there to help you._

“Seriously, you okay?”

“Going to need stitches when this is all done.”

 _Fuck. Eds, I’m fucking sorry._ But the words he wanted to speak got stuck in the same place all the other words from before were lodged too.

So instead, “Sweet, Scarface!”

“Christ.” But Eddie smiled, so Richie did too.

And it could have been any day after school, skipping his final bio period so he got out at the same time as Eddie. Bikes walked down the grassy slope of the hill behind the eastern entrance, past the peeling _Derry High_ sign, and if Eddie had been quiet because something had happened — assholes, Bowers’ old gang still causing shit even after Bowers was long gone — it had been easier to joke, _to tell some stupid story_ , than admit that he was only really scared when Eddie was scared.

Memories anew, scrawled freshly somewhere on his temporal lobe: sat-out school dances; Bill asking Richie which brand of condom to use because Richie had them all convinced he’d rounded the bases with Eleanor Collins, even though he’d ended the date early and went to Eddie’s instead; a persistent, angry jealousy of Bill and Stan and Mike and Ben, who all seemed so fucking happy whenever a girl so much as looked at them, and how easy it was for them to go on dates and hold hands and make out at the movies and fuck in the back of their parents’ cars, while Richie just did his best not to stare openly at Eddie like some lovesick idiot; Eddie asking Jill Parr to the winter formal and Richie feeling like he had the wind knocked out of him when he heard — secondhand, from Stan — because he knew then that what little shot he thought he _might_ have had on his more optimistic days, it was fucking _dead and buried under rubble now_. 

Richie sucked back the disappointment, raw again after so many years, and washed it down with Eddie’s bottle of water.

(Reliability is a construct, an artificial notion that relies on complete trust of the storyteller. In narratives, unreliable narrators are the exception to the rule. We generally take the protagonist at face-value for the most part, and see their perspective as factual, something not to be too scrutinized because it would throw the whole narrative into question. Uncomplicated stories don’t usually prompt close examination in this sense because the author designs them to seem objective. In life, all narrators are unreliable — misremembered events, misinterpreted interactions, memories forgotten entirely, introspection gone amuck — and even if those storytellers are well-intentioned and unaware, it doesn’t make them any more trustworthy.)

*

This story that Richie would never tell anyone but himself should have ended with leaving Neibolt, being half-dragged out by Ben and then collapsing on the street as he watched the house implode in on itself like some overwrought metaphor. Or perhaps it should have ended in the quarry, a baptismal washing away; almost too symbolic for real life, although the grime and greywater and blood (some his, most Eddie’s) did need scrubbing. Or after still, in his hotel room with only whiskey and the deepening of a soul-sick ache he hadn’t imagined could have worsened, but somehow did in Eddie’s absence. 

But the story didn’t end there.

Because it wasn’t until he knelt down on the kissing bridge that he remembered.

(Because there can be no payoff without the setup, and the setup only asserted itself then, far too late.)

An offering to a shrine of teenage misery, initials cut into wood amidst all the straight, happy couples like some sort of misplaced, apocryphal text separated from the rest. The other carvings were declarations, advertisements for full-named pairs — _Tony loves Amanda, Bethany and Tyler forever, Wendy hearts Josh_ — but still the anonymous _R + E_ remained, faded and eroded like the ever-vague memories of before.

He was re-etching the bottom line of the _E_ when it hit him.

The force of it — of the memory, and the ones that followed — wasn’t a gentle scrawl but instead a pocket knife hacking into wood, blunt and splintered and painful as decades-old images dug into his mind, renewed like the carved initials themselves.

A walk back from the clubhouse, dark, the only lights were the moon and the star canopy overhead through bare branches and the radiant glow of Eddie’s watch that illuminated the ground below them. Fall weather, crisp leaves underfoot, a handmade scarf around his neck. Senior year. Just the two of them because Richie left when Eddie left. Like always.

He could still taste the joint, acrid and earthy, even though the high had dissipated in the cool air, and Richie tongued over his gums trying to wipe the lingering remnants away as Eddie darted off the path to the fence.

“Have you seen this?”

_Oh fuck, no._

“What?” Too innocent, unknowing, blameless, and he must have sounded so false, he’d thought.

“Meant to show you.” Eddie was still a little stoned, giddy in a way Richie hadn’t seen in years. “Was up here with Mike the other day ‘cause he said Jen had carved their names, then I saw this.”

Lit by Eddie’s watch, the damning _R + E_.

“Thought it was funny. Got something you want to tell me, jackass?” Eddie was grinning, walking away from it already, clumsily stepping off the grass and onto the path again.

“Oh yeah, man,” Richie said, but the plastered on smile didn’t reach his eyes, his laugh brittle and breaking, and Richie knew that Eddie would notice it, that he’d see the twitch in his cheek.

“What’s the matter?” Eddie stopped in front of him and shone his watch in Richie’s eyes like a cop in some shitty detective show they made fun of, and Richie only blinked stupidly, blinded by both the beam and the stress spots clouding his vision. “Richie?”

_Say something. Say literally anything._

“Nothing,” and _shit_ , it was so incriminating.

“Holy fuck,” Eddie breathed, and it was over just like that, he knew. Found out and outed and now Eddie would never talk to him again and he wouldn’t even get to have _this_ (this middling, ersatz, one-sided thing that at least allowed him to be around Eddie even if sometimes the glare off of him was so brazen that Richie could scarcely see past it to anyone else) and the guys wouldn’t want to be around him, and if it got out — of course it was going to get out, how could it not — he wouldn’t even be able to go to school, and and and —

And Eddie was kissing him, hard and insistent, his hands balled up around the strings of Richie’s hoodie, pulling him closer with a sort of rabid want that couldn’t be directed at _him_ , surely.

But it had been, Richie remembered now, dropping the knife onto the grass as he doubled over, clutching the fence post as if it could force air into his suddenly hyperventilating lungs. Eddie had wanted him, not only with that kiss but with all the following ones too.

Eddie had been an inkwell, overfilled and overflowing, with sweaty hands that would tug at Richie’s clothing like they were never close enough, like he wanted to compel Richie to _come here_ and _be near_ and _stay here_ all the Goddamn time. He’d push Richie up against walls and down on beds and into hammocks, never any hesitation or doubt, just want. He’d straddle him, hold Richie’s face in his hands, touch him in ways that never seemed casual or relaxed, and there was nothing taken for granted about his affections; everything was deliberate and determined, like he’d written it all out in staining black pigments. He’d cut Richie off mid-sentence, shut him the fuck up with his mouth, swallow his words whole, and Richie gave them up gladly as Eddie pressed ever closer, his heart hammering to a soul-sick beat that could have been Richie’s own.

It was all stolen moments hidden from the others, from everyone that wasn’t just the two of them; the backs of their hands brushing as they walked side-by-side; furtive kisses behind bleachers; Richie relearning how to climb the drainpipe by Eddie’s window well after everyone else was asleep; Eddie on top of him in the back of the Buick, parked off a desolate backroad, as Eddie’s hands wrote stories on his skin that Richie would forget within months.

Stories that should have inked in permanently, stuck with him for life, insoluble ink, instead of being washed away as soon as he left for Chicago.

“Wanted you since we were kids,” Eddie had said sometime after the bridge, curled up together in Richie’s bedroom under the same blankets they used to fight over at childhood sleepovers. “Never thought you felt the same,” and Richie had laughed then, because how the hell had Eddie ever thought that, he’d been so fucking obvious. “I’m serious, I was sick with it. I was convinced you’d hate me if you found out.”

_Did you get the chance to remember?_

_Or did you die thinking I didn’t love you?_

Eddie hadn’t known any more than Richie had at the time, he was certain. There was no way Eddie fucking Kaspbrak would have sat quietly on those memories.

(Stories make meaning out of chaos. They link otherwise arbitrary events together to form something cohesive, ordered, where the end is predicated on the beginning and middle, where the payoff stands because the setup supports it.)

There was no resolution, no closure, no climactic moment of reunion or recognition that might have _somehow_ shifted what happened in Neibolt ( _or given Eddie some reassurance in those last terrible minutes; I shouldn’t have gotten up, I shouldn’t have left him there, I shouldn’t have I shouldn’t have I shouldn’t have_ ). There was no goodbye. Because in life — not a manufactured story — the events had been recursive, disjointed, recalled out of order, and so the setup was left wanting, unremembered before it could affect anything.

*

Richie stood in front of the microphone.

 _Let me tell you a story,_ he said.

And there was some comfort in that.

**Author's Note:**

> Talk to me on [Tumblr](https://spunknbite.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/spunknbite).


End file.
